Twilio pricing

What Twilio SMS Actually Costs.

The headline rate is $0.0083 a segment. The real monthly bill is usually 1.5 to 2 times that, once every fee is added up.

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The components

Four Line Items, Not One Rate.

The per-segment rate
$0.0083 per SMS segment in the US. A segment is up to 160 characters for plain text; messages with emoji or special characters split at 70 characters per segment, which can silently double or triple the segment count on the same message.
Carrier surcharges
AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon each add roughly $0.003 to $0.005 per message, passed through by Twilio as a separate line item. This alone brings the effective per-message rate to about $0.011 to $0.013.
Number rental
$1.15 a month for a standard local number, $2.15 a month for toll-free. This is billed whether or not you send a single message that month.
A2P 10DLC registration
US business texting on a long code requires registering a brand and a campaign with the carriers. Brand registration runs from around $4 for a sole proprietor up to $48 or more for a standard brand, campaign registration is roughly $15 to $17 one time, and there's an ongoing monthly campaign fee of about $1.50 to $10 depending on the use case.

Put together

What It Adds Up To At Real Volume.

Rough, all-in monthly totals: segment cost, carrier surcharge, number rental, and a mid-range campaign fee.

500 messages/mo

1~$11/month all-in
2Cheaper than most flat-rate plans

2,000 messages/mo

1~$27/month all-in
2Around where flat-rate options start winning

10,000 messages/mo

1~$115/month all-in
2High-volume territory Twilio is built for

Where TexMax fits

A Flat €15 A Month, No Per-Message Fee.

TexMax sends through your own Android phone's real SIM instead of a rented, registered number, so there's no per-segment charge, no carrier surcharge line item, and no A2P campaign fee. Roughly in the range of a few hundred to a bit over a thousand messages a month, that flat rate starts beating Twilio's pay-as-you-go total. Below that, Twilio's own pay-as-you-go pricing is often the cheaper option. And at genuinely high, bursty broadcast volume, a registered A2P number is built to handle scale a single consumer SIM isn't, so Twilio remains the right tool there.

See the fuller TexMax vs Twilio comparison, or the full field of SMS API options.

# Send a message through the paired Android gateway
curl -X POST https://api.texmax.app/messages/send \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer tmx_your_api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "deviceId": "8jr3ewqh55y7gyj3e0w0stw5",
    "address": "+15551234567",
    "body": "Your appointment is confirmed."
  }'

Questions worth answering upfront.

Why does Twilio cost more than the $0.0083 headline rate?
The headline rate is just the per-segment SMS charge. On top of it, carriers add a surcharge of about $0.003 to $0.005 per message, you pay $1.15 a month to rent the number, and US business texting requires A2P 10DLC registration, which adds a one-time brand and campaign fee plus a monthly campaign fee of roughly $1.50 to $10. Combined, the real cost usually runs 1.5 to 2 times the headline rate.
What is A2P 10DLC and do I have to pay for it?
A2P 10DLC is the US carrier system for registering application-to-person business text messaging on a standard 10-digit number. If you're sending business SMS from a Twilio long code to US numbers, you generally need to register a brand and a campaign, which carries a one-time registration fee and a small monthly campaign fee on top of Twilio's own charges.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Twilio for lower message volumes?
At lower, real-conversation volumes, a flat-rate service can work out cheaper than Twilio's per-message model once all its fees are included. TexMax, for example, is a flat €15 a month with no per-message fee, since it sends through a real Android SIM instead of a rented, registered number.
At what point does a flat monthly price beat Twilio's per-message pricing?
Roughly in the range of a few hundred to a little over a thousand messages a month, depending on which Twilio campaign tier and carrier surcharge apply. Below that range Twilio's pay-as-you-go model tends to be cheaper; above it, a flat monthly rate tends to win.

Your phone. Your SIM. One API.

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